Amanda Wicks

When Kate McKinnon departed the Saturday Night Live stage in May 2022, along with a slew of others including Pete Davidson and Aidy Bryant, the clock immediately began counting down to her return. Davidson had the honor of being the first among that departing cohort to host, earlier this season, but McKinnon got her chance last night, closing out the year with SNL’s annual Christmas episode. As she discovered, it’s one thing to steal the scene and quite another to steer the show.

When Molly Shannon auditioned for Saturday Night Live in the mid-’90s, she received some appallingly bad advice. A scout warned her against doing the character Mary Katherine Gallagher—a geeky teenager who stuck her hands in her armpits and smelled them when she got nervous—because the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, wouldn’t like it. “He’ll think it’s weird, that dirty little character,” Shannon recalled being told.

The Oscars have a lot to navigate this year, between their ongoing struggles to increase diversity and atone for last year’s most shocking moment. But the 95th ceremony began with two powerful wins, which in turn delivered two powerful speeches. Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis—both nominated for the first time—won Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, for their work in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The beauty of an ensemble comedy cast comes partly from its fluidity. As fun as it must be to peacock in the spotlight, holding everyone’s attention, it’s just as important to know when to step back. Not every Saturday Night Live host exhibits that knowledge, but some of the stronger ones clearly pick up on the dynamic and thrive in sketches where their contributions fall closer to that of a supporting player.

Super Bowl winners once went to Disney World to celebrate their victories, but Saturday Night Live has occasionally offered another option. Last night, Travis Kelce—the Kansas City Chiefs tight end and two-time Super Bowl champion—joined the likes of the quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, each of whom hosted the sketch show shortly after winning the big game.

It wasn’t exactly a scene-stealing moment—just a physical gag executed seamlessly. Kenan Thompson played Kevin, a man who was braggadociously excited to ride the amusement-park attraction Mission Slingshot, which promised to shoot riders up 400 feet in three seconds. Strapped in beside his more timid friend (played by five-time host Woody Harrelson), Kevin quickly succumbed to the staggering heights and passed out.

The defining quality of Saturday Night Live throughout its staggering 48 years on the air has been its live factor. Where other sketch or variety shows have had the benefit of post-production—namely planning and polish—SNL’s spirit has most often emerged under the pressure of live television.

Aubrey Plaza’s mischief as an intern began long before she played the sardonic April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation. During college, she briefly served as a page at NBC, where she spent her time sharing fake facts on the tours she led and sneaking off to vomit away her hangovers. Unsurprisingly, Plaza lasted only a few months before being asked to leave, but in her short stint at the network, she got the chance to trail SNL’s design department.

Compared with last year’s Saturday Night Live Christmas show, when the extremely contagious Omicron coronavirus variant necessitated a reduced cast and crew, this year’s managed to avoid any major disruptions. But one piece of news, released mere hours before last night’s airing, delivered an unexpected turn: The show would be Cecily Strong’s last.

The plan was relatively straightforward: Take two comedic legends, each with a rich history on Saturday Night Live and a working partnership spanning decades, and invite them to co-host. Steve Martin and Martin Short had even previously shared the SNL stage in 1986, when they hosted alongside Chevy Chase to promote their film Three Amigos. Last night’s episode, therefore, had every reason to be not just funny but riotous—the kind of impish return Will Forte delivered last season.

The final Saturday Night Live before the midterm elections on November 8 couldn’t find much to say about the dire political situation unfolding in races across the country. The shoulder shrug of a cold open suggested that Democrats might do better in the polls if they found wild characters—such as Guy Fieri and Azealia Banks—to run for office and compete with similarly outrageous personalities on the Republican ticket.

Last night, Saturday Night Live returned to one of its singular successes—the jolly, always-grinning Halloween character David S. Pumpkins (played by Tom Hanks) from a breakout sketch in 2016—and gave him the honor of a second appearance. His return felt rare. Outside of the “Weekend Update” desk, recurring characters have been scant over the show’s past few seasons.

Bad things seem to happen to Megan Thee Stallion right before big things do. This week, someone reportedly robbed her Los Angeles home days ahead of her appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she became the second female rapper to pull double duty as host and musical guest. Last night, she put that incident to the side and strutted out on the SNL stage in a sheer dress and black corset, prepared to be herself.

Pop-culture gossip is like catnip for Saturday Night Live. Celebrity misbehavior has fueled many, many of the show’s sketches over the years—some of them quick-witted and clever, some of them bizarre duds. But not all celebrity news is created equal: There’s Will Smith’s Oscars slap, and then there’s the befuddling recent fallout of the YouTube stars the Try Guys.

Pop-culture gossip is like catnip for Saturday Night Live. Celebrity misbehavior has fueled many, many of the show’s sketches over the years—some of them quick-witted and clever, some of them bizarre duds. But not all celebrity news is created equal: There’s Will Smith’s Oscars slap, and then there’s the befuddling recent fallout of the YouTube stars the Try Guys.

By dint of its longevity and evolving ensemble cast, Saturday Night Live doesn’t stay the same for very long. The series featured a record 21 cast members last year, before major players including Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson, Aidy Bryant, and Kyle Mooney left in May, followed later by Alex Moffat, Melissa Villaseñor, Chris Redd, and the relative newcomer Aristotle Athari.

From Kate McKinnon’s first sketch on Saturday Night Live in 2012, it was evident she’d be a star. Appearing in a Pantene commercial as Penélope Cruz, alongside then-host Sofía Vergara, McKinnon delivered Cruz’s Castilian Spanish accent with a winking twist.

Playing a prince tasked with choosing a bride from among three princesses on Saturday Night Live last night, Mikey Day asked a question that turned out to define the episode well: “Okay, is that it?” He raised the inquiry in a sketch poking fun at the rule of three in folklore. His options included a beautiful princess and a smart princess, which meant that something had to have been wrong with the third princess.

In seeking historical precedence for the upcoming Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito stretched far beyond the ideology of originalism—the guiding precept among a certain conservative faction that constitutional law should not stray far from the Constitution.

Each month, the average TikTok user watches about 24 hours of video. Considering that videos now top out at 10 minutes, that’s a bewildering amount of content and reach. TikTok hit 3 billion downloads in July 2021, becoming the first non-Facebook app to do so. As a global vehicle for a wellspring of DIY creators, it has saturated the cultural moment. Saturday Night Live knows this, and it keeps wanting to say something about the platform. But it doesn’t quite know what.

Last night’s cold open on Saturday Night Live, which featured four of the show’s Black cast members, illustrated how far the show has come in the past decade. SNL has struggled with diversity throughout its tenure, but during the 2013–2014 season, the problem reached a fever pitch. The show had not hired another Black woman after Maya Rudolph’s departure in 2007, leaning instead on Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah to dress in drag when necessary.

Six days after the Oscars Slap came to dominate America’s cultural conversation, Saturday Night Live joined the fray with not just one joke but a torrent of them. Perhaps this was inevitable: The now-infamous pop-culture moment—an attack on a comedian, no less—is clearly within SNL’s wheelhouse, and the show latched on to the moment with zeal. But it was too much, too late.

Amazon Go stores are touted as a futuristic shopping experience promising unfettered ease and speed. The stores are equipped with the company’s proprietary Just Walk Out technology, which combines a nebulous mix of “computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion”; shoppers scan their Amazon app to enter, grab what they want to purchase, and … leave. If that sounds like shoplifting, it apparently feels like it too.

John Mulaney’s Saturday Night Live episodes have become something akin to tradition since he first hosted in 2018. The former SNL writer’s grandiose musical numbers and irreverent adoration of pop culture make him a guaranteed bright spot whenever he appears. But between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Mulaney’s recent stints in rehab for drug addiction (which he has discussed publicly), that assurance felt fragile in the lead-up to last night’s episode.

Before the former Saturday Night Live cast member Will Forte made his hosting debut on the show yesterday, one of the more memorable moments from his eight-year tenure circulated online. In a 2005 sketch, Forte played a timid, overwhelmed spelling-bee contestant. When asked to spell the word business, he produced a deadpan, 75-letter sequence of consonants. As would so often occur during his time on SNL, Forte bulldozed past absurdity to find fresh hilarity.

Saturday Night Live’s first episode of 2022 attempted to make up for the strange, empty show that ended 2021 amid the rise of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant. The cast was back, the masked audience was back, and the show, as they say, went on. But it couldn’t escape the world outside of 30 Rock’s doors.

Two years before the beloved family sitcom Full House began airing on ABC, Bob Saget appeared on HBO’s The Ninth Annual Young Comedians Special. Though his role as Danny Tanner—that affectionate, straitlaced father to three young girls—would eventually define his acting career, his stand-up set showcased a much bawdier side.

The first time Billie Eilish appeared on Saturday Night Live, the then-17-year-old put her famously green hair in two topknots, donned a graffiti-print outfit, and climbed the walls of a rotating room to underscore her eerie, enigmatic image. She rose to fame creating dark, ASMR electro-pop that distilled the fears of her generation with wry directness. Yet months later, she swept the 2020 Grammys with her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and her rising star turned meteoric.